AARoads Impostor

[thspfc]

As of the last few days it's Russian roulette as to where "AARoads.com" takes me.

[LilianaUwU]

When we say no DST threads, we mean it.

Stolen joke alert!

[Scott5114]

When we say no DST threads, we mean it.

Stolen joke alert!

@TheCatalyst31 beat you to it by a few hours.

[Max Rockatansky]

Is that what a Discord server looks like?

[vdeane]

Fun fact: with all the forum issues, something like a third to half of all posts within the past day have happened within the past half hour.

[Max Rockatansky]

This seems to be the most traffic the forum has gotten on a Sunday in general for quite some time.

[Scott5114]

Is that what a Discord server looks like?

Yes, that's the wiki Discord server.

Fun fact: with all the forum issues, something like a third to half of all posts within the past day have happened within the past half hour.

Induced demand! Induced demand!!

[Rothman]

The number of threads I'm ignoring is at an all-time high.

[formulanone]

The number of threads I'm ignoring is at an all-time high.

Conversely: all time highs ignore the forum

(Check with local laws and statutes.)

[Takumi]

When we say no DST threads, we mean it.

Stolen joke alert!

@TheCatalyst31 beat you to it by a few hours.

This is how I learn that I'm on the imposter AARoads Discord that has zero activity.

[Chris]

The number of threads I'm ignoring is at an all-time high.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the main page, you'll get the 'recent posts' section. It's increasingly common to see that 80 or 90% of recent posts are in off-topic or non-road threads, seemingly about trivial subjects.

Evidently there is a demand for this type of content (the forum has 1.2 million posts), but I can understand that you'd be ignoring such threads nowadays.

[TheCatalyst31]

When we say no DST threads, we mean it.

Stolen joke alert!

@TheCatalyst31 beat you to it by a few hours.

This is how I learn that I'm on the imposter AARoads Discord that has zero activity.

I didn't know there was an impostor AARoads Discord. The active one was started to coordinate the wiki, which is probably why it wasn't posted on here, but a number of other forum members have come over since then.

[Scott5114]

The number of threads I'm ignoring is at an all-time high.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the main page, you'll get the 'recent posts' section. It's increasingly common to see that 80 or 90% of recent posts are in off-topic or non-road threads, seemingly about trivial subjects.

Evidently there is a demand for this type of content (the forum has 1.2 million posts), but I can understand that you'd be ignoring such threads nowadays.

It should be noted that this isn't necessarily an accurate summation of overall forum activity—most people show up and make a string of posts on whatever conversations interest them, and it's not unusual that no other user will be breaking up this string (case in point, right now I'm seeing three posts in a row from JayhawkCO on my display). If a user starts at the top of the forum and works their way down, all of their posts in the off-topic section will show as the most recent.

[Alex]

The parking page that Rothman showed a screenshot of is from Ionos. I personally hate it with a passion, and it appears when the server has DNS issues.

The 500 Internal Service errors are a combination of the nearly million daily GET and HEAD requests from Hong Kong IP addresses that started by Wednesday last week. The "TOO MANY REDIRECT" errors coupled with the 500 Errors were a result of me trying Cloudflare and the disconnect between Cloudflare and internal redirects I have on AARoads for http to https. While Cloudflare did block 6,000 plus requests from Hong Kong, the overwhelming bulk still made it through while the site (especially the Forum) was subjected intermittently to infinite redirect loops.

The GoDaddy holding page was the result of me disconnecting the AARoads.com domain from the Cloudflare and Ionos nameservers and redirecting the nameservers on Godaddy to their parking page.

The managed server that AARoads has been on for the better part of 20 years has degraded significantly in options over the last few years. Ionos does not even offer managed servers as a hosting plan anymore (and from what I have seen very few companies do anymore). Their customer service had been awful with regards to the Hong Kong IP attacks and solutions. The only option they could give me for blocking those IP addresses was .htaccess code, which when I implemented it resulted in an 500 Internal Server error that took the entire website down.

I finally got ahold of someone extremely helpful at Ionos on Sunday. We ended up talking for around 2 hours. As I a result I am trying a VPS server for the site with Plesk (I have a 30 day money-back guarantee, so if this doesn't work out, mostly it will be a loss of time versus expense). With root access there are a number of things I can implement such as security or php packages. While I posted on Facebook that running a dedicated server is outside my knowledge wheelhouse, apparently with what I do know, I am 60-80% there.

I will not know if my efforts are successful until I complete the file uploads, which AARoads has around 900,000 files. The biggest issue I have encountered so far is implementing two installs of Wordpress.

Over the last two months I have been working nearly nonstop recoding the back end of the website to use object-oriented programming. Ultimately the custom scripts that Jake Bear wrote and my friend Matt assisted with will be wholesale replaced, as will Wordpress eventually. I was getting close to finishing the main site scripting last week when the server starting bogging down terribly.

[hotdogPi]

@Alex

I've been talking to the owner of another forum (https://conwaylife.com/forums, which is recreational mathematics and has absolutely no overlap with this community except myself), owner Nathaniel (username is simply his first name), since he was getting a whole bunch of bots, overloading the server. He implemented Cloudflare, which is why I suggested it here, and it got implemented. However, unlike there, I've noticed the number of bots hasn't decreased much here. (I have noticed a significant decrease in the number of "parked domain" messages, but it's not zero.) Here's what he has to say about it:

How long ago did they implement it? If less than 48 hours then they might have to wait for DNS to fully propagate — bots might still be accessing the site via the old dns servers

Kk for now I'd tell them to just wait then until the 48 hours mark. If they're still getting a lot of bot traffic then on their server they can block access from all non-Cloudflare IP addresses (the list is here: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/ips/) to make sure that no bots can access their server directly without going through CF

[kphoger]

http to https

I'm no computer nerd, but it sure does seem like that's responsible for an outsized number of web issues.

Over the last two months I have been working nearly nonstop recoding the back end of the website to use object-oriented programming. Ultimately the custom scripts that Jake Bear wrote and my friend Matt assisted with will be wholesale replaced, as will Wordpress eventually.

On the one hand, thank you so very much.  I know you must enjoy working behind the scenes to make things run smoothly, but it's easy for the rest of us to forget how much hard work it takes.

On the other hand, get some rest.  We were not made to work nonstop.  Take a whole day to do nothing computer-related.  Soon.

[Rothman]

All I can say is a big thank you to Alex on all of this.

[Alex]

On the one hand, thank you so very much.  I know you must enjoy working behind the scenes to make things run smoothly, but it's easy for the rest of us to forget how much hard work it takes.

On the other hand, get some rest.  We were not made to work nonstop.  Take a whole day to do nothing computer-related.  Soon.

I appreciate that, thank you. The one issue with this code work is that it is not really usable until it is 100% complete. So all of the work put in thus far is only visible behind the scenes. That makes it hard for me to want to take breaks as I still cannot debut the new code (and replace the problematic old code).

[vdeane]

The only option they could give me for blocking those IP addresses was .htaccess code, which when I implemented it resulted in an 500 Internal Server error that took the entire website down.

I discovered when I was implementing 301 redirects on my site that having errors in the .htaccess file causes that.  Fortunately, they make validators for .htaccess files; IIRC this one was the one I used.

I also remember reading something about needing Cloudflare to handle the HTTP/HTTPS redirect rather than the origin server if Cloudflare is used, so that might have been part of the redirects.

[vdeane]

So... how are the people who weren't happy about the SMF default theme feeling about having no theme?

[LilianaUwU]

So... how are the people who weren't happy about the SMF default theme feeling about having no theme?

We should keep this to piss them off.

Anyways, my own suggestion was to hide most of the board to unregistered users. That way, there would be little to no content for scrapers to scrape to begin with.

[hotdogPi]

The option to click "Not Following" to avoid a thread appearing in Unread Replies, which many people have asked for over the years, more than makes up for the lack of theme.

[vdeane]

So... how are the people who weren't happy about the SMF default theme feeling about having no theme?

We should keep this to piss them off.

Anyways, my own suggestion was to hide most of the board to unregistered users. That way, there would be little to no content for scrapers to scrape to begin with.

I wonder if they tried that during the brief time when all the boards (and the theme) were up and the post counts looked right but no posts were showing up.  I never signed in during that interval, so I only know what it looked like to unregistered users.

[Molandfreak]

Yikes. If we hide most of the board to unregistered users, good luck generating new interest in the forum.

I maintain the opinion that the Urban Planning board should be visible to non-registered users. Not that I'm biased or anything.

[Max Rockatansky]

Most newbies to the hobby who are actually real aren't coming to the forum anymore anyways.  More new people are going to other sources like mainstream social media platforms.  As an example the AAroads Facebook page has 40,000 or so followers.  I see not harm in hiding most stuff from unregistered users if it keeps the spam bots away. 

I'm getting early Netscape and late era Prodigy Online vibes from the lack of forum format.